AMITAV 2 LAST

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PTI

July 12, 2016

UPDATED: July 12, 2016 14:10 IST

In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has

In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost.

The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence - a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms.

According to the author, climate change also poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single-most important political conception of the modern era: the idea of freedom, which is central not only to contemporary politics but also to the humanities, the arts and literature.

He says the lack of a transitive connection between political mobilisation, on the one hand, and global warming, on the other, is nowhere more evident than in countries of South Asia, all of which are extraordinarily vulnerable to climate change.

"In the last few decades, India has become very highly politicised; great numbers take to the streets to express indignation and outrage over a wide range of issues; on television channels and social media, people speak their minds ever more stridently. Yet climate change has not resulted in an outpouring of passion in the country," he writes.

"This despite the fact that India has innumerable environmental organisations and grassroots movements. The voices of the countrys many eminent climate scientists, environmental activists and reporters do not appear to have made much of a mark either," he adds.

Ghoshs new book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. PTI ZMN TRS ANS

This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.

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